WePay Inc. - Customer Service Department of the Year

Company: WePay Inc, Redwood City, CACompany Description: WePay is the payments partner to the platform economy. It processes billions annually for online platforms including Constant Contact, FreshBooks, GoFundMe, Meetup, and Zoho. WePay protects its partners from risk and regulatory exposure while supporting seamless payments experiences for their end-users. The company was named to the 2015 and 2016 Inc. 500 lists as one of the fastest growing private US companies. For more information, visit wepay.com.Nomination Category: Customer Service Department CategoriesNomination Sub Category: Customer Service Department of the Year - Financial Services - 100 or More Employees

Nomination Title: WePay Inc

Tell the story about what this nominated department achieved since the beginning of July 2015 (up to 650 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes: TEXT REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION

“Improving service even in the face of challenges”

WePay provides support to our partners in various ways – to their business leaders, their engineers, their support team and even their end-user customers. Our support is a unique blend of Enterprise Support, Consumer Support and Relationship Management. This year, WePay’s high growth meant that we doubled the number of partners we support. Because we support a partner in so many ways, doubling the number of partners means that we significantly increase the complexity of our support model. To face this challenge, we needed to re-focus our strategy this year on increasing efficiencies and innovating through process and technology. As a result, even in the face of challenges, we ended the year improving all our key metrics and setting us for long-term scalability

To face the challenges, we focused on key strategic goals:

• Increase Efficiency with Sub-Queues – to increase efficiency we worked to streamline workflows with partners and our internal departments. We built special drop down fields to assign tasks or escalations to different partners and internal teams. This allowed for better transparency and clarity on next steps agents needed to take. For example task queues included, “WePay action required”, “Partner action required”, “Risk underwriting review”, “Account Transfer”, “Failure Review” etc…

• Structure to Scale with New Support offerings – we realized that part of the increase in complexity was because we never set expectations on how partners worked with us. Everything was custom or ad-hoc. Thus, we launched three new levels of support and built a support onboarding process for each new level. This helped to set expectations with new partners and set them and us up for success. This also helped created a new revenue stream.

• Enable for Quality & Mastery with Support pods – to address the multitude of partner permutations, we built support pods where groups of similar partners queued into the same agent team. These pods also combined those partners’ support team requests AND their end-user requests. Previously, these were split into different agent teams as a Tier 1 vs. Tier 2 queue. By combining this, agents could focus on building deeper understanding of a sub set of partners, as well as the full end to end business model of a partner. This resulted in better mastery and ability to take more tickets quickly.

• Grow Team with Career paths – we also realized that instead of complexity being a drain on the team, we could use it as an opportunity to grow the team and keep agents engaged. Thus, we built a Mastery training program as well as built career plans for each and every agent. These plans included what rotations, projects and what other queues they would learn next.

Results:

• Faster response – although y/y payment volume has increased by 60%, we’ve cut our email SLA from an average of 27 hours to average of 15 hours (44% reduction) -
• Efficiency – with pods we’ve seen a 20% increase in efficiency
• Team morale – agents now feel that they can get mastery faster and are more satisfied with their jobs. We’ve had zero (0) regrettable losses this year with an overall attrition of 9%.
• Revenue growth – support offerings are now a critical component of pricing. The majority of our new partners signed are buying a support upgrade.